Originally titled "Spiderwebs," lead singer Chris Martin wrote this song about his callous behavior toward his bandmates, particularly Coldplay's Will Champion. Martin doubted Champion's abilities as a drummer and eventually fired him from the band in 1999. A few days later, Martin came to regret his hasty decision. He apologized to Champion and sheepishly asked him to rejoin.
Martin explained to The South Bank Show in 2009: "We got signed, and we went to a studio, and we were doing OK, but this producer we were working with told us we weren't good enough, we weren't technically good enough. What bands often do in that situation is blame the drummer for going out of time or whatever. We didn't really know that music was supposed to be about the feel of it. We thought, 'Everything has got to be technically perfect because we have a record deal now.' So it ended up with us asking Will to leave. Three days went by, and we were doing our thing and playing with a drum machine and stuff and just felt really miserable."
Martin grew embarrassed of this song, calling it "cheesy" and comparing it to Celine Dion during a concert at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles in 2002. These comments upset the rest of Coldplay, with Champion later telling the band's biographer Gary Spivack: "We love these songs. We wrote them and are proud of them and to belittle them in front of thousands hurts the credibility of the music. It's all right to joke, don't get me wrong, but it was our songs that were the butt of it all. After a while, when Chris would do that, it started to affect how we played them too."
"Trouble" was recorded four times before Coldplay got a take they were happy with. Speaking to Sound on Sound magazine, the song's producer, Ken Nelson, explained the arduous process behind the Parachutes cut: "The backing track was recorded, and then each time, we'd add to it to see if it was working. But we decided on the first three versions that it wasn't really happening. For the last one, we got Pro Tools in, and it was recorded into Pro Tools with a shaker providing the rhythm. Will played drums, and Chris played piano in the little wooden room, and that was the backing track. The bass went down quite quickly, and then Johnny did his guitars."
Two music videos were made. The original UK version, directed by Sophie Muller (No Doubt, Garbage), finds the band in the Wild West, where Martin is held captive in a warehouse and tied to a chair. It was shot at a ranch in Newhall, California.
Coldplay's label, Capitol, feared this video was "too dark" for the US, so a second version was made. Directed by Tim Hope, it features the band members as two-dimensional figures who get caught up in a tornado and land in suburbia. The clip won for Best Art Direction at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards.
The band performed this song with Elton John at the Gwinnett Civic Center Arena in Duluth, Georgia, in 2003. The concert was hailed as a breakthrough moment for Coldplay in the US, with Elton comparing their performance to U2. "I felt and everybody with me that night said, 'God, this is a big band,'" he told Interview magazine.
Trouble – Norwegian Live EP, a five-piece collection recorded live at Oslo's Rockefeller Music Hall in 2000, is named after this song. The EP, released exclusively in Norway, was Coldplay's first-ever live release.
In 2001, Rocky actor Sylvester Stallone asked Coldplay if he could use "Trouble" in his action film Driven, but the band declined. That same year, Coldplay also turned down a multimillion offer from The Coca-Cola Company to use the song in a television commercial for Diet Coke. The group feels that allowing their songs to be used in commercials would degrade their value to fans.
"Trouble" was the third single released from Coldplay's debut album,
Parachutes, after "
Shiver" and "
Yellow." The song peaked at #10 in the UK. In America, the song barely "troubled" the chart, peaking at #115, although it did get a fair amount of radio play.
Chris Martin told
MTV News how the song saved the band from being a one-hit wonder. "We thought it was a great song, but not a single," he said. "We never thought it'd play in America. It's not exactly Korn."
In an interview with Radio X, Chris Martin said that the original version of "Trouble" had a guitar riff that was "heavily influenced" by the early singles of the British rock band Supergrass. However, when the song was recorded for Parachutes, the band decided to change the guitar riff and add a piano part. The result was the anthemic piano ballad that we know and love today.
